Houston can lead in biotech

JOHN MENDELSOHN, M.D., HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, July 3, 2011

Every year, thousands of patients from around the world travel to the Houston area for life-saving medical care. Houston is home to the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical complex, but the benefit extends beyond hands-on patient care. Thanks to the area's major hospitals and universities, Houston is one of the top regions in the world for medical research. People everywhere have benefited from research-based discoveries made — or inspired - by physicians and scientists in this field during the past few decades.

I believe the potential in the Houston area for expansion and commercialization in the field of biotechnology parallels - and may even surpass - the promise for commercializing research discoveries I observed in San Diego more than 25 years ago as an academic researcher.

Many of the Houston area's resources are comparable or superior to those available in other leading biotech regions. The region captures more than $1.8 billion in annual support for academic research and development. This is conducted at Rice University, Texas A&M University, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Houston, three University of Texas System institutions (UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, UT Health Science Center and The University of Texas Medical Branch), Texas Southern University and NASA's Johnson Space Center. Our region also is home to 150 life science companies, which have far lower aggregate annual expenditures. Experienced management talent exists and inexpensive real estate on which to expand facilities abounds, but Houston has fewer major biotech companies compared with other regions with comparable university research programs.

Although our academic science is outstanding, we cannot apply discoveries to benefit the most people until we convert them into products, such as a drug, an instrument, a device or a technique. And Houston, despite its impressive track record, struggles to attract the biotechnology venture capital and start-up companies essential to fueling the types of economic growth and scientific innovation that currently exist in Boston, Silicon Valley and San Diego. There is room for our academic institutions and community leaders to help build more bridges between university laboratories and corporate research.

Texas lawmakers and government leaders have taken important steps to narrow this gap. Since 2005, the Texas Emerging Technology Fund has allocated more than $197.2 million in funds to 133 early-stage companies, and $173 million in grant matching and research superiority funds to Texas universities. The state-funded Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas has awarded $382 million in cancer research, commercialization and prevention grants since 2010. The business community is another important contributor; groups such as BioHouston, for which I serve as vice chair, function as matchmakers for innovators and venture capital.

In September, I will change roles at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where I have had the privilege of serving as president and working with incredibly talented researchers, doctors and staff for the past 15 years. Following a sabbatical at Harvard and MIT this fall, I will return to the M.D. Anderson faculty as the co-director of the new Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy. I also will become the L.E. and Virginia Simmons Fellow in Health and Technology Policy at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. My new roles will give me a chance to focus on the broader world of biomedical research and the best ways to create public policies that facilitate collaborative scientific discovery involving academia and companies.

As our regional biotechnology industry develops, it will drive growth in many other economic sectors: law, finance, design, construction, consulting and housing, among others. In the past 100 years, the Houston economy has repeatedly reinvented itself to answer the needs of one emerging industry after another - cotton, oil, energy and medicine are examples. These transitions have not been easy, but each new industry has generated tremendous economic development in Houston. The biotech revolution will do the same, and I look forward to helping accelerate its growth.

Mendelsohn is the president of The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, named the top cancer hospital in the nation by U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Hospitals" survey. He also has significant experience in the laboratory; his research during two decades helped pioneer the development of cancer therapies that target the aberrant genes, gene products and cell-signaling pathways that cause the disease.